I'm trying to understand Amazon's policy of EBOOKs.
Questions:
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1. Has any of your published books been converted into an EBOOK (by Amazon or a third-party seller) and sold by Amazon?
2. If so, how did the process go? Did Amazon or the original Publisher of the book contact you about it or ask for your permission to do so?
3. Does Amazon send you a royalty for the EBOOK?
4. What is the Copyright agreement for EBOOKs? Original, printed, book may have some Copyright deals. When a seller like Amazon sells that book as an EBOOK, how does the Copyright law work? The EBOOK technology is new. Did the original copyright laws cover the upcoming and new technology services for eternity?
5. Does Amazon have any policy on their selection of the books to be sold as EBOOKs? How do they select which books to be sold as EBOOKs?
Their policy may be a "Google Play" for them as well as for freelance non-academics on the Internet to get scholarly books for a cheap price or for free. But it certainly raises serious questions, especially for upcoming young academic scholars -- why write scholarly books, especially when the Internet is infested with freelance arm-chair analysts and plagiarists? Does academic scholarship mean anything?
6. Does Amazon spend that much time to scan a book (in my case a 1000+ pages book) in order to convert it into an EBOOK? Amazing!!
There may be similar questions that I can't think of at the moment. However, I was shocked to see my book ("A Reference Grammar of Classical Tamil Poetry") being sold by Amazon as an EBOOK. I never knew about it until recently since someone asked me where to purchase my book.
See:
I'm not dead yet! Amazon (or whoever converted my book into an EBOOK and sold it to Amazon) could have had the courtesy to let me know what's going on!
I would appreciate any help from you in figuring out what's going on in the "e-publishing" world.
Thanks and regards,
V. S. Rajam